Poverty Is Facing Off with the Super Bowl in San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - APRIL 11: Protesters march onto the house of Jack Halprin, a Google lawyer, April 11, 2014 after he purchased a multi-family house and illegally evicted six tenants in San Francisco, California. The two evicted tenants are public school teachers. Halprin wants to convert the house into a single family residence. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)Getty Images

The Super Bowl isn't being played in San Francisco this year, but city officials have managed to spend an estimated $4 million in taxpayer dollars to celebrate it. The so-called Super Bowl city miles north of Levi's Stadium (where the game will be played this evening) is just one major expenditure. Another is a dinner for NFL officials that reportedly cost $12,000.

Over at Vice, Peter Moskowitz has done a fantastic job reporting this story, which juxtaposes the contrast of game-day preparations with San Fran's issues of income inequality, poverty and homelessness.

Now, San Franciscans are responding to this injustice. Earlier this week, hundreds of people began protesting outside of Super Bowl city to create a more authentic look at life in San Francisco for tourists blinded by the festivities.

"You have mass displacement, you have homeless people being pushed from one neighborhood from another—it's just not humane," Miguel Carrera, the housing justice organizer for the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco, told Moskowitz. "And the mayor is spending millions to throw a party."

There has been an effort to move homeless people out of the area over the past several days. Many have been pushed out, with some being relocated to shelters. As one man put it in an interview with ABC, "They don't want certain elements around during the Super Bowl." In other news, it's not good for the cameras.